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Should we change the structure of user guides to make them more inspiring?

Nancy Duarte presented a talk on the hidden structure that the greatest communicators and persuaders have used over thousands of years:

She argues effective presenters move from “What is” to “What Could be” during their speech:

The effect is that changes happens – ideas get adopted.

It’s easier to see it working in training documentation, but with the development of knowledge bases and a more conversational and collaborative approach to user documentation, perhaps it could be applied there as well.

About Ellis Pratt

Ellis Pratt is Sales and Marketing Director at Cherryleaf. You can follow Ellis on Twitter. Cherryleaf helps you provide technical and user documentation your customers will love - through our content development, recruitment, consultancy and training services. See the main Cherryleaf web site for more details.

3 thoughts on “Should we change the structure of user guides to make them more inspiring?”

I certainly don’t expect the users of the manuals I write for banking software to be inspired by them. But if the documentation we provide with the product explains how to use the product while doing their jobs, not just what the various parts of the software do, I’d expect them to like using the product more than whatever they used previously. I don’t think we should try to be more inspirational than that.

I just gave a presentation at work based on these principles and everyone in the room was energized. It was amazing to see that people reacted positively once I told them how it is now and then how it could be, leaving the audience with a feeling that my proposal solves the stated problems. I don’t know how it would work in technical documentation, but perhaps the marketing department should take note.